Palestinian Refugees

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Thousands of Palestinian refugees took to the streets across Lebanon on Saturday in a show of solidarity with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat as Israeli troops tightened their siege on his compound. More than 15,000 Palestinians and Lebanese marched through Sidon, calling on Lebanon to open its border with Israel so they could join the uprising against Israeli occupation. Protesters dragged Israeli and U.S. flags through gutters before burning them.

BEIRUT, LEBANON -- During a visit, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday rejected the idea that Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon might be forced to stay there permanently, saying they should have the right to return home. About 400,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in a dozen camps that were set up for those who fled or were pushed out during fighting around Israel's creation in 1948. Israel has refused to accept the return of the refugees, saying they should settle in a future Palestinian state or where they are.

UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday appointed American Karen AbuZayd to head the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees and expressed hope that during her three-year term there will be "decisive progress" toward lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees is the main provider of education, health, relief and social services to more than 4.1 million registered Palestine refugees in the Middle East.

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- After a day of zipping through Israeli checkpoints, talking with Palestinian officials and visiting the birthplace of Jesus on Thursday, President Bush bluntly called on Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank and help pave the way for creating an independent Palestinian state. The statement at Jerusalem's King David Hotel came after Bush sought to reassure Palestinian leaders that he would serve as a fair mediator on a day when he became the first sitting U.S. leader to visit the de facto Palestinian White House in Ramallah.

BEIRUT, LEBANON -- During a visit, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday rejected the idea that Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon might be forced to stay there permanently, saying they should have the right to return home. About 400,000 Palestinian refugees and their descendants live in a dozen camps that were set up for those who fled or were pushed out during fighting around Israel's creation in 1948. Israel has refused to accept the return of the refugees, saying they should settle in a future Palestinian state or where they are.

REGARDING CHARLEY Reese's May 4 column, ``If ethnic cleansing is wrong in Balkans, it's wrong in Mideast'': There is an abundance of documented historical evidence that, in 1947, when Palestine was partitioned, the Arab nations called upon their people in Israel to leave to allow them to ``push the Jews into the sea.''Those who heeded the call and left Israel were not accepted into the nations that called them, and they, along with their descendants, became...

JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Friday drew what he called his bottom line in any peace deal with the Palestinians: no transfer of sovereignty over Jerusalem's revered Temple Mount to the Palestinians, and no right of return for Palestinian refugees. Barak spoke after another day of confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel once again clamped a full closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip after bombings that killed two Israelis a day earlier.

The queen, mother of King Hussein and one of the protectors of his throne during Jordan's political turbulence in the 1950s, died Tuesday in Geneva. She was 86. The queen, referred to by many Jordanians as the Queen Mother, spearheaded national relief efforts to help tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled to Jordan during the 1948 Middle East War.

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian negotiators will insist on reaching agreements with Israel on thorny issues such as Jerusalem's status and the return of Palestinian refugees in a final peace accord, the new chief Palestinian negotiator said Saturday. Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was appointed last week to lead negotiations with Israel on a final peace agreement, said the Palestinians will not accept leaving any so-called final status issues to later negotiations. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak has suggested that the most hotly disputed issues be resolved through interim accords that would defer a final arrangement.

Israel warned Tuesday against moving ahead too quickly with the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. Israel, Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinians held a one-day meeting in the Jordanian capital to negotiate repatriation of Palestinian refugees for the first time since the war. Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres cautioned that the West Bank and Gaza Strip do not have...

CAIRO, Egypt -- This week's conference in Maryland has highlighted Arab unease over the ability and will of a weak U.S. president to deliver Middle East peace and fears that Israel has scored a public-relations coup while refusing to concede on such core issues as Palestinian refugees and the fate of Jerusalem. Arab nations, most notably Syria and Saudi Arabia, had been reluctant to attend the U.S.-sponsored talks, which set the framework for future Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Now, with their prestige on the line, Arab officials are returning to their capitals with two tasks: convincing their populations that the summit was a crucial step toward a Palestinian state and keeping pressure on the U.S. and Israel to deliver progress.

JERUSALEM -- With two army helicopters escorting his motorcade, Ehud Olmert ventured into the West Bank on Monday to discuss the most divisive issues of a possible peace settlement, the first visit by an Israeli prime minister to Palestinian territory in seven years. "I am delighted to see you," Olmert said, embracing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas inside a heavily guarded hotel in Jericho. The Israeli leader said he had come to discuss "fundamental issues" in the decades-old conflict, "hoping that this will lead us soon into negotiations about the creation of a Palestinian state."

BEIRUT, Lebanon -- Four people were wounded in clashes that broke out in a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon on Thursday, Palestinian officials at the camp said. The gunbattle between members of the fundamentalist Fatah Islam and members of the Sweidan family of the rival mainstream Fatah faction began as an argument between two people that developed into a shootout.

UNITED NATIONS -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Tuesday appointed American Karen AbuZayd to head the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees and expressed hope that during her three-year term there will be "decisive progress" toward lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees is the main provider of education, health, relief and social services to more than 4.1 million registered Palestine refugees in the Middle East.

In Arabic, the term "Al-Awda" means "the return," and it symbolizes the dreams and hopes of millions of Christian and Muslim Palestinians forced into exile as refugees by Israel in 1948. It's the essence of the Palestine-Israel conflict. In order to create a Jewish state, Jews had to increase their population through immigration. When the notion of a Jewish homeland was embraced in 1917, there were about 85,000 Jews and 650,000 Christian and Muslim Palestinians. That changed 30 years later to 614,000 Jews and 1.4 million Palestinians.

WASHINGTON -- Seeking to reassure an Arab world jolted by commitments he made last month to Israel, President Bush on Thursday reaffirmed the traditional U.S. position that a territorial settlement between Israel and the Palestinians must be the result of negotiations, not of unilateral action by Israel. Bush said he would lay out his vision of a "just peace" in a letter to Palestinians, a gesture that could help counter the impression among Arab leaders that the United States prejudged the final outcome of Middle East peace negotiations and abandoned its role as an impartial broker.

WASHINGTON -- Seeking to reassure an Arab world jolted by commitments he made last month to Israel, President Bush on Thursday reaffirmed the traditional U.S. position that a territorial settlement between Israel and the Palestinians must be the result of negotiations, not of unilateral action by Israel. Bush said he would lay out his vision of a "just peace" in a letter to Palestinians, a gesture that could help counter the impression among Arab leaders that the United States prejudged the final outcome of Middle East peace negotiations and abandoned its role as an impartial broker.

Israel isn't Switzerland. Dr. Azmi Bashara, a member of the Israeli Knesset, asked Israeli officials for an accounting of the property, the money in the banks and the funds in the Muslim and Christian endowments, all taken over by the Israeli government.Their answer? ``We don't know. We don't have those figures.''Switzerland has gone to a lot of trouble to find dormant bank accounts of Holocaust victims and has acted honorably throughout. So, perhaps someone should file a class-action lawsuit against Israel on behalf of Palestinian refugees for an accounting and return of the money and land confiscated by the Israeli government.

On the anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacres -- in which hundreds of Palestinian refugees were killed by Israel's proxy army in Lebanon, and in which then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was forced to resign his job after being implicated in the attack -- the Sentinel's Editorial Board decided to side with Israel's position that the Palestinians must choose a leader other than Arafat. Most Palestinians see Sharon as brutal and murderous, but don't condition their entering negotiations on finding some other leader to represent Israelis.

JERUSALEM -- Israeli forces swept into a Palestinian refugee camp in the northern West Bank early today, Palestinian security officials said, in an apparent hunt for suspects in the shooting deaths of five Israelis. The pre-dawn incursion into northern Tulkarem refugee camp came hours after Israeli officials said they were weighing a military response to a Palestinian shooting rampage Sunday in the nearby communal farm of Kibbutz Metzer. No injuries were reported.